Boulder's homeless camping ban is back. Now what?

Tanja Jordan decorates her pillow as Rich Martinez sleeps outside the Boulder Public Library Main Branch on Friday, just days after the City Council instructed police to resume enforcing Boulder's urban camping ban after a five-month pause. The two said they are homeless. (Paul Aiken / Staff Photographer)

Be professional and enforce the law with "temperance and respect," and continue to point homeless people toward appropriate services when possible, he wrote.

But, Testa ordered, if an officer encounters an urban camper previously contacted by police, or who should otherwise know better, that officer is to issue a summons.

Amanda "Panda" Baker and Soyc Willian, who said they are homeless, hang out in the park next to 13th Street in downtown Boulder on Friday. (Paul Aiken / Staff Photographer)

The city's elected leaders have been under pressure to clean up swaths of downtown overrun this summer with homeless activity that many find offensive, and they could not have been clearer in their collective direction on Tuesday.

That was a mistake, the council agreed this week, lamenting that the Boulder Creek Path and the Civic Area have become de facto campgrounds, outdoor bathrooms and 24/7 hangouts that no longer feel safe to many — and especially not to families.

Advertisement

Even Councilwoman Lisa Morzel, a longtime homeless advocate, said Boulder might do well to become "less welcoming," lest this summer's "fiasco" bleed into next year.

Testa himself supports a firmer stance on the camping ban, but said in an interview Thursday that he thinks there are "very legitimate questions" raised by Tuesday's direction.

Perhaps chief among them: Given that the city has no walk-up shelters open until Oct. 1, where are all the soon-to-be ticketed campers going to sleep?

"People still exist," Testa said. "We give a warning or we give a ticket — it doesn't solve anything. All it does is displace somebody."

Boulder decided on Tuesday to convene a working group to figure out, among other things, what kind of expanded sheltering is needed for next summer, when some significant percentage of this season's unhoused will presumably still be in town.

For now, police find themselves in the position of having to tell people not to sleep outside — a legal practice that some prominent groups find unconstitional — while at the same time having no legitimate resting alternatives to suggest, beyond simply leaving town, maybe toward the lightly patrolled foothills, or maybe just to some other city.

"People will say, 'OK, I still have to sleep,'" Testa said. "I get it. I know that."

He's at a loss, when asked what he thinks will come of those interactions. What he knows for sure, and expressed to the council on Tuesday, is that he'd like to see the burden to come up with the answer transferred off his officers' shoulders.

"The police department is part of the puzzle, but we're just partners at the table in terms of talking about this whole homeless complex issue," Testa said.

'Got to be more to it'

One person feeling an additional burden right about now is Boulder County Sheriff Joe Pelle.

This much, he knows: If you get a summons, you're expected to show up in court. A vast majority of ticketed homeless people don't show up in court, though, which results in arrests on failure-to-appear charges and leads to a short stint in the Boulder County Jail, which, nearly all agree, is productive neither for the defendant nor the justice system.

And those who don't leave, he said, may find themselves in a county jail also at a breaking point, with overcrowding so severe that jail staff freely admit they often don't consider themselves in the business of rehabilitation so much as crowd control.

"Once again, we're using the police and the justice system to try to solve a complex homeless issue," Pelle said. "They might see this as a solution on the front end, but they're going to create a lot of collateral consequences, system-wide."

Pelle's got two deputies and one ranger in the mountain areas that currently, frequently, play host to illegal camp sites. And if his jail had any room left, he said it would still be largely fruitless to dump the homeless there.

"Jail is an expensive solution," Pelle said. "I can't even call it a solution. It's an expensive option.

"I understand the frustration (Boulder is) facing with people who ignore the summonses and won't do the programs and won't pay the fines and won't change their behavior, but there's got to be more to it. I'm not sure this is a problem we're going to enforce our way out of."

To the extent that Boulder has a long-term plan for summer sheltering, it begins with identifying a number of beds that both reflects outstanding regional need and whatever obligation, or "fair share," the city's leaders and homeless working group members decide is appropriate.

The City Council already has shown strong interest in an expanded, centralized day shelter and resource center, which should be doable — if not virtually certain to anger neighbors wherever the theoretical facility ends up.

And Human Services Director Karen Rahn, who is spearheading the working group, said Friday that she hopes the group is prepared with a concrete plan on the nighttime sheltering front by April 30 — the final day of the the winter walk-up season at the Boulder Shelter for the Homeless.

Once plans are in place for both day and night response to homelessness, the thinking goes, ticketed campers will have a choice to make: work with service providers who want to help, or face the legal consequences of being homeless but unmotivated to do anything about it.

"Those who don't want help when we're enforcing the camping ban will be made unwelcome," Councilman Bob Yates said. "We can't accommodate people who are homeless and do not want help.

"At some point, our obligation has been fulfilled. We have a much smaller obligation to those who say, 'Just house me,' or, worse yet, 'I'm gonna camp in your park, and I'm gonna disobey your laws.'"

'Want to have a plan in place'

It's certainly not the preferred blueprint of homeless advocates whose dreams of a new homeless village on city-owned space were mostly dashed on Tuesday.

What they've long pushed for is the idea that the solution to homelessness in Boulder mostly requires much more housing, or at least pop-up communities that afford residents a meaningful amount of personal space to both breathe and for the practical purposes of long-term storage and organization.

But the plan is palatable to the City Council, and offers hope for an eventual closing of the loop burst open this week with the resurgence of the camping ban in the absence of other sleeping options.

In the meantime, until the Boulder Shelter for the Homeless opens for the winter season in October and as long as the camping ban is being enforced again, the element of personal choice — that the ban will motivate some percentage of the homeless people here now to either leave or try to enroll in transitional services, and that some of those considering coming here to camp will now be dissuaded from doing so — may be the only thing guaranteed to put an immediate dent in Boulder's problem.

For now, law enforcement begins a difficult stretch until shelter beds reopen and cold weather brings the annual drop-off in the city's homeless population.

Meanwhile, Boulder's new working group, the roster for which is not set, has eight months to devise an exit strategy. And the question of the city's "fair share" will have to be answered to get there.

"It's important to get a handle on this," Rahn said. "Who do we really need to be supporting with public resources? How many people do we need to support? And in what capacity? Day shelter? Overnight shelter in the winter, and in summer? Day services? Case management? Mental health?

"But we know," she added, "we really want to have a plan in place by the end of this next sheltering season."

Boulder is pretty good at producing rock bands, and by "rock," we mean the in-your-face, guitar-heavy, leather-clad variety — you know, the good kind. For a prime example, look no farther than BANDITS. Full Story